Seven days a week, Singh drives his yellow taxi from 2:30 in the afternoon until past 11 at night. By the time he gets home from the city, it is 2 a.m. Sometimes he doesn’t make it home until 5 in the morning. His seamed face and gray beard makes him look older than his 45 years.
. . .
Ever since his driver left him for Uber 13 months ago, Singh has been pushing the boundaries of his body to save his family’s future.

Despite working seven days a week and sleeping an average of four hours a night, he is three months behind on his medallion mortgage payments. The bank can repossess his medallion at any time.

“Losing the medallion is not so bad,” he said. “The problem is losing the house.” Singh, like many medallion owners, had borrowed against his medallion to help pay for his home.

Evgeny “Gene” Freidman is no fan of Uber. The increasing popularity of this vehicle-for-hire (or ridesharing) company has lost him millions of dollars. He has even asked New York City taxpayers for a bailout. As difficult as bailing out the big banks was to swallow, bailing out a taxi mogul—who at one point owned more than 1,000 New York City taxi medallions—is an even harder sell. A bailout would be especially outrageous considering that Freidman and his financial backers are actively working to make consumers pay more for fewer options.

Many of the new round of upstarts, on the other hand, are providing services, like transportation, that have a high marginal cost. You want someone driven around, you’ll need to pay the driver a decent hourly rate to drive them. That means they won’t be able to realize Google-like economies of scale. At the same time, the switching costs of trying a new service are pretty low. That suggests to me that at some point, they are going to have to raise prices substantially — and only then will we find out if people are willing to pay enough for it to make the company profitable.

This is why I always roll my eyes a bit when I see articles discussing how Uber, or some other company, is going to completely change the way we work/communicate/travel/insert activity here. We don’t even know what a lot of these companies will look like when they are mature.

They may be able to sustain large demand at higher prices and revolutionize our lives (and the wallets of the folks who invested in them). Or they may settle into a profitable but not transformational niche with somewhat less usage but better margins. Or many of them may slither out of existence, taking their massive investments with them. Because it’s only in myth that unicorns are immortal.